Shawn Layden and Mark Cerny: from Icarus moment to managing 3,000 devs

Shawn Layden and Mark Cerny deserve a lot of the credit for why Sony’s PlayStation 4 is sitting at the top of the console war. While the Nintendo Switch is giving them a run for their money now, it went on sale much later, and it is still making up for Nintendo’s failure with the Wii U. The PS4 has sold more than 80 million units, and it is beating Microsoft’s Xbox One family by two-to-one.

That success was years in the making. Cerny was the architect of the PS4, a leader among developers who took back control of the console business. And Cerny has also led the development of Knack and Knack 2, two games that were meant to show off the PS4’s capabilities.